Scenes from the aftermath in Oakland:stories of victims, survivors and healers.

Thursday, April 4, 2013

Ice City Almanac's Top Stories

From A Violent Thing: Inside an Oakland Gang Call-In
All gunshot wounds in Oakland are brought to Highland. She tells them,
calmly, that the worst case scenario if you end up at Highland is
surviving. Surviving a gunshot wound is the worst thing that can
happen. It only takes one bullet in the spine and you’re a
quadriplegic. No movement, no sex, someone has to wipe your ass. No
one comes to visit you because no one wants to see you like that. I
become your only friend, she tells them. She approaches the
sharply-dressed Participant, points over toward the baby. Is that your
baby? Is that your queen holding the baby? He nods politely. He’s
looking her in the eye, looking up at her. You want that baby to see
you paralyzed, with tubes coming out of you, with a colostomy bag?
Imagine that. This is not rhetorical, it’s a demand. Imagine it. This
right here today, she tells them, this is a blessing. Because you are
alive and free.

From 13: At the Funeral of Thirteen-Year-Old Jimon Clark
Just ahead of me in line at the funeral of Jimon Clark, the last of six
homicides to occur in Oakland between August 18th and August 25th, a
group of kids in their early teens has reached the coffin. They look
like they are not quite sure what to do. In line, all but two of them
have been fairly upbeat, nonchalant, possibly faking their cool, or
possibly they have done this so many times that it feels about the same
as standing in line at a taco truck. I want to think they are faking,
that their hearts are beating faster than usual, that they are at least a
little freaked to confront the dead body of their friend and
schoolmate, that maybe they are hiding secret worries that his gunshot
wounds are visible. I want to think that for these baby-faced, rather
slight, early teenage kids from Oakland, neither the day nor the event
is routine.

From The Dark Urges: In the ICU with Daryl Starks' Family
Darryl Starks' little sister needs $20. She needs it for a new tattoo,
one that will commemorate his death, which is imminent. Starks himself
lies intubated and comatose in a narrow hospital bed, in ICU room #19,
at the Alameda County Medical Center, a.k.a Highland Hospital. He
lies under bright lights. His head is tilted back a little on the
white pillow, skewed just slightly to his left, toward where his oxygen
tube runs. His eyelids are not completely closed. It’s Saturday
night. Starks was shot on Friday evening, at 78th Avenue and Bancroft,
while driving home from the store. He was hit once in the shoulder
and once in the back of the head. Now an ICU nurse sits distractedly
at a computer station just outside a picture window with a view onto
Starks' unmoving body. Occasionally the nurse checks his iPhone.

In
the neighborhood where these kids live and go to school, shootings and
homicides occur with a depressing regularity. Five days ago a man
and a teenager were shot right here on Foothill Boulevard. Last summer,
Jimon Clark was killed on nearby Bancroft. He was 13.
A few days before Jimon was shot in the back, Melvin Murphy was
stabbed to death in an apartment complex on Bancroft. Derrick Jones
was killed on Bancroft by police back in November. Alvaro Ayala was a
student at the same high school as Lovell. He was killed almost one
year ago to the day. And yet, somehow, at least superficially, they
remain, like all teens, conventional: self-conscious, social,
periodically oblivious, ignorant of or uninterested in decorum. They
do tend to cooperate with the instructions of the preachers, to clap
when they are asked to, to stand when they are asked to. They know
when they are expected to say “Amen” or to answer in unison a question
about Jesus or the perils of smoking pot. But they don’t take any of
the pastor’s words seriously. Hopefully that’s because they assume
they will never kill anyone anyway. No doubt, being kids, and despite
today's evidence to the contrary, some think they will never die. And
they don't seem gloomy. Until it is time to see their schoolmate’s body.

From Against Nostalgia: After The Death of Raymen Justice
There is a note, handwritten in black, taped to the apartment door,
discouraging visitors from knocking. It makes the point that the
Justices will have nothing to give you, especially money, and don’t
knock unless you have brought something for them. Marilyn Harris, of
course, brings, as always, the promise of help, hope, and healing. She
always enters even the tensest, most somber, most fraught rooms with
the confidence and even the joy of the gifts she brings. It’s 9:30 in
the morning. There are maybe seven people in the small, dimly lit,
disheveled apartment. Raymen’s sisters are here. On the day after the
killing, Raymen’s brother, Rayven Jr., collapsed and was taken to the
hospital. Rayven Jr is a composer and performer of sort-of hip hop love
ballads. He seems to be talented and is no doubt a sensitive person.
He is recuperating with the boys’ mother at her home in East Oakland.
A family friend named Miracle is here. Two years ago her brother was
taken from this very apartment building and murdered; his body was
burned so severely that the police could not declare the death an
official homicide. There is a Tupac poster on the wall. Over the couch
there is a narrow, framed portrait in oils of Raymen’s father, Rayven,
in his younger days in a suit and round hat with an upturned brim. It
was, I believe, a certain favored style in Oakland in the early 80s.
Rayven Sr is a slight man, gray-haired, a Vietnam vet, angry as hell,
righteous about having raised his two sons on his own, about their
potential and their good grades. Raymen had a 3.3 grade point average,
he tells us several times. Rayven Sr is sitting next to me on a small
sofa. He’s drinking coffee with cream and sugar. Man he is pissed. He
gets up a number of times and leans over the coffee table and into
people’s faces to declare his independence from any need of the money
being offered him.

From The Big Event
That bullet that wounds or kills, it also ricochets. As the news
spreads through a family, through the streets, it continues to wound or
kill; if one person has been taken from us body and soul, a dozen more
are lost to us in lasting bitterness, subversive grief, debilitating
fear, and, in the case of a child growing up on streets lorded over by
the gun, a way of life they learn from repeated violence and loss.

From (New) Code of the West
In genuine disbelief, I turned and walked back against the tide and
stood across from the church entryway to watch, as more and more people
staggered out. Soon I heard sirens but only gradually realized they
were for us. Within twenty minutes there were dozens of cops from
numerous forces -- OPD, CHP, Alameda Sheriffs, Parole, Corrections.
Lots of collegiality between them. Hugs and handshaking and "Where you
been lately?!?" There were guys in riot gear. That erie modern sight of
helicopters hovering over you. Most of the cops had tear gas guns, but
at one point a tall, white officer (I'd say 80 to 90% were white) took
something that looked like a guitar case out of a van, snapped it
open, pulled out a machine gun, clicked the cartridges in, slung it
around his shoulders and headed up the street. He looked thrilled. I
counted nearly a hundred cops in half a dozen picket lines across at
least two streets.